The Prince of Midnight
by Ardith Block
Summary: Christopher Carrion finally has Candy Quackenbush with him in the Dead Man's House. He's intrigued by her, maybe loves her, needs to kill her. Follow Carrion's side of Days of Magic, Nights of War from Marapozsa Street to the Hereafter and beyond Barker.
1. Chapter 1:  The Momentary

A/N: This is my first fic. Comments and criticism requested. Thanks and enjoy!

**~ Chapter I ~**

**The Momentary**

Christopher Carrion had watched the girl closely as she had pressed her forehead to the lens of the momentary. That moment's expression, he decided, he would keep in his mind along with the protective scowl captured by Pixler's mechanical bug. The brow of the girl from the Hereafter had crinkled with curiosity just before it touched the padded edge of the wooden box. Curiosity could kill this girl, was killing her now. As he often had in recent days, Carrion ruminated on how the girl had not, in fact, been killed already. He knew well how the inhabitants of the Hereafter, when the Harbor had still been open, had been driven mad by the unfamiliarity of the Abarat.

This girl had seen much too much to have kept hold of her sanity, but that look of hers, as with that first show of spirit against the robotic pest on the Yebba Dim Day… It was too controlled. There was something different about this girl, and Carrion knew it. Without one of Pixler's recording gadgets, there would be no way to replay Candy Quackenbush's imperfections which were so perfectly encapsulated in this her last expression, and he could tell by the girl's slackening face that it would indeed be her last.

Her body he would dispose of in some way or another. It would be useless, fearless as the shell of the girl would be, to try to make a meal of it for the darkly luminous nightmares ethereally swimming through the mask which guarded Carrion's corpse-like visage. The idea of leaving the body to be consumed by the beasts of Efreet was one of the most horrifying ways Carrion could think to be rid of her entirely, but this one time, he could not bring himself to be horrifying. He could smother the girl's being and pinch it out like a dying flame, but letting those foul monsters desecrate her in any way would be a brutality that even he, the Prince of Midnight, could not bear. The only end he could think worse for the human girl was to let his grandmother scalp her and, filling her with Todo mud, turn her into one of those demented stitchling warriors. Carrion would grind the girl into bone dust for his next conjuration before he would let Mater Motley and her coven get their mending, skeletal fingers on her.

The body could wait for another time. The girl's mind was the matter at hand, her consciousness to be dealt with before her body could be wrenched from it. He neared Candy until he could see every last stray brown hair jutting from her temple, and, sure that she had thoroughly disappeared into Marapozsa Street, he began to jerk his hand through the air in small circles as if slowly creating a viscous tempest. Candy's disembodied senses stirred to the surface of Carrion's mind. She saw the street. She saw the residents. She saw the dreams that all on Marapozsa Street wore as carnivalesque hats. She was getting deeper into that world, turning corners, even getting lost, but on Marapozsa Street, her head was still bare as that of her physical body, limp against the momentary.

It was an inconvenience that the stubborn girl had not put the hat on unprompted. Most would mimic the dreamers in order to seem ordinary. They did not realize that these dreamers were not dreamers at all, their bodies dead and their minds displaced. No, they were only dreams, and to wish to be them was to wish to be obliterated. But this girl, this obstinate girl, she had never really been normal, not even in the Hereafter.

Carrion knew this with the same near-complete confidence with which he knew everything else about Candy. Each action confirmed that Candy Quackenbush was exactly the girl he had imagined in those one-sided conversations in the woods of Gorgossium. And then, in killing her with her dreams, he could take comfort in a new absoluteness of certainty and in the memorial of her which would remain in the momentary eternally, a frozen recollection. He reconciled himself to this small form of possession, and as if his words were magic instead of sound, Carrion spoke Midnight's dark poetry stripped of horror, "_Show us your dreams._"


	2. Chapter 2: Waking Dreams

A/N: Thanks for all of the encouragement on the first chapter! Hope you didn't mind the long wait for the second too much (the result of a bit too much travel this past month). I promise the third installment is well on it's way. Keep the comments coming. Constructive criticism is welcome.

**~ Chapter II ~  
**

**Waking Dreams**

It was a disconcerting feeling for Carrion to be surrounded by himself on Marapozsa Street. Only part of his consciousness was there – leaving the rest behind to dissociate from the vessels and their dream-chapeaux – but even with the slight separation, seeing that one human girl from the Hereafter from every possible angle was too crowded a perspective to fully acclimate to, even for the Prince of Midnight. He tried to focus himself into one being, a leader who, through his single-minded concentration, could make Carrion's vision less prismatic.

Once he was thoroughly embedded in a man crowned with a miniature Ferris wheel, the Dreaming Street was not an uncomfortable place to be. The box was a place of Carrion's invention refined based on the zoetropes which had been imported centuries before from the Hereafter. The Abarat had already improved upon the design with enchantments by the time the device had come to Carrion's attention. For a few decades, a travel sized version had been sold to visitors of Babylonium so that the tourists could re-envision the endless amusements of those streets and tents no matter the hour.

Only within the past half century had Carrion adapted the hybrid technology for the purpose of interrogation. Initially, his models had been as harmless as the keepsakes of the carnival island, but even in those early stages, his intentions were never as frivolous as were those of the Babylonian innovators, motivated solely by entertainment and profit. Now, solidified into the rough, orange-tinged flesh of the man on Marapozsa Street, Carrion thought of his glass collar in the physical world, flooded with nightmares, and of how difficult a process dream extraction could be.

"Where are your dreams?" Carrion asked through his chosen projection.

He could see the girl look from the jubilant hat back down to his eyes. She blinked once, more out of shock than out of consideration. "What…" she returned, her voice trembling.

"Come on, girl. Everyone wears their dreams. Where are yours?"

She shook her head back and forth. "I don't have any."

"Aw," said Carrion, practically cooing. "But your dreams look so lovely. I can tell. Show them to us?"

The girl whipped her head around looking, Carrion supposed, for a door. She would not find one, the foolish girl. "How do I get out of here?" she asked.

"Out?" Carrion asked. Before she knew it she would not know that she had come in. "What do you mean?"

"How do I get out of this place? Out."

"There…" he began as if musing "is no out."

She turned on her heels and began running back through the alley. Too late if she saw the alley, defined down to every last crack in the paving, she would only make a maze of it with her mind. "Show us your dreams, and it will be better …"

Carrion let himself flow into several eyes, and the eyes followed her, several mouths, and the mouths called to her, "Show us your dreams." She turned from one face to another, looking for an answer "Out? Out?" but, without knowing, saw only Carrion.

_Poor Candy_, Carrion thought as the girl stopped to turn away from the multiplicity of _him _and stare into vacant space. She was conjuring herself out of her body, and in moments her life would turn into a dead image, an image for his viewing. "Show us your dreams, girl," he said, seeing without seeing the last doubt coaxed out of her eyes. And those eyes – they were almost enough to make him feel real pity for her – the one melting to water as the other settled like fertile silt on a bank.

Candy's arms slowly pumped back and forth.

He felt a surge of agitated power from his corporeal body. "No."

She swung her arms faster, readying herself for the jump.

"No!" Letting go of his dream – _foolish, foolish dream!_ – Carrion saw what she saw, the passing of a motor to a steady _whoosh, whoosh, whoosh_… "You'll die, girl. Just show us your dreams." He could see it in her swinging arms, picking up speed, her tensed legs. He would not be able to stop her. "You'll be cut to bits," he warned as he began to suspect she would not be, clenching fists in many bodies as he began to worry she would be.

"Your dreams—" he started before her feet left the ground, and then all he could say was, "Die!"


End file.
